Blood Sisters: The Women Behind the Wars of the Roses

by Sarah Gristwood

  Even when traced backward in time, the story does not lose much drama. Thomas More described the same scenario, the one Shakespeare too would echo almost exactly—the king struck by this woman “fair and of good favour, moderate of stature, well-made, and very wise,” who claimed that if she was too “simple” to be his wife, she was too good to be his concubine, Elizabeth herself virtuously refusing Edward’s advances, but “with so good manner, and words so well set, that she rather kindled his desire than quenched it.” Hearne’s “Fragment,” written in the early sixteenth century by someone who was probably at Edward’s court in its later years, similarly recorded that Edward “being a lusty prince attempted the stability and constant modesty of divers ladies and gentlewomen,” but after resorting at “diverse times” to Elizabeth, he became impressed by her “constant and stable mind.”

  The Italian traveler Mancini, writing in 1483, even has Edward—so “the story runs”—holding a dagger to Elizabeth’s throat; again, as More and Hall would have it, “she remained unperturbed and determined to die rather than live unchastely with the king. Whereupon Edward coveted her much the more, and he judged the lady worthy to be a royal spouse.” One of the most dramatic versions occurs in Italy very soon after, in Antonio Cornazzano’s De Mulieribus Admirandis (Of admirable women). This reverses the scenario, to have Elizabeth holding the king off with a dagger; the very stuff of melodrama.

  These are stories that equate the nobility of virtue—which could be allowed to Elizabeth—with the blood nobility she did not possess. The question is, of course, whether they are all only stories. There is a very real possibility that the tale of the Grafton meeting under the tree is a myth. Certainly, the dating of it is confusing. It had been as far back as 1461, after Towton, that Edward had ridden slowly south and first found the Woodville family, with their widowed daughter, Elizabeth Grey, licking their wounds; one account suggests that the romance started there, because when the king left the district two days later, he had not only “pardoned and remitted and forgiven” Elizabeth’s father all his offenses—Woodville and his son had fought on the Lancastrian side at Towton—but also “affectionately” agreed to go on paying Jacquetta her annual dowry of “three hundred and thirty three marks four shillings and a third of a farthing.”

  Woodville was indeed pardoned in June 1461, and the king agreed in December that Jacquetta should receive her dowry. Jean de Waurin early claimed that it was Edward’s love for Woodville’s daughter that had gotten Woodville his pardon, but the timing of events complicates this interpretation, suggesting a more prolonged and more pragmatic story.

  From that record of the Woodville pardon in 1461, it is well into 1463 before Elizabeth Woodville next appears in the records, and then it is in the context of a property dispute over her dowry from her first husband. Indeed, in mid-April 1464, Elizabeth Woodville was still negotiating for her dower lands as if she had no idea she was about to become queen.

  It is possible that Elizabeth did indeed stand by the side of the road, but in 1464 instead of 1461; however, since her father had by then been restored to royal confidence as a member of Edward’s council, she would surely have had better ways to put her plea. It may be Elizabeth simply met Edward at court after Woodville had been restored to favor. Caspar Weinreich’s Chronicle of 1464 claims that “the king fell in love with [a mere knight’s] wife when he dined with her frequently.” This would in many ways make sense. In the first years of the 1460s, his advisers suggested various foreign marriages for the new king, and Edward seemed quite content that negotiations should begin. This suggests that it was indeed several years into his reign when he met Elizabeth and changed his mind.

  The circumstances of the marriage between Edward and Elizabeth Woodville are not much clearer. Hall and More have Edward first determining to marry Elizabeth and then taking secret counsel of his friends; the more popular, and more dramatic, version, however, suggests a marriage made in total secrecy. Robert Fabian (contemporary compiler of the New Chronicles of England and France and probably also of the Great Chronicle of London) describes a marriage made at Grafton early in the morning of May Day, “at which marriage no one was present but the spouse, the spousess, the Duchess of Bedford her mother, the priest, two gentlewomen and a young man to help the priest sing.”

  After the spousals ended, he says, the king “went to bed and so tarried there upon three or four hours,” returning to his men at Stony Stratford as though he had merely been out hunting but in fact going back to Grafton, where Elizabeth was brought to his bed nightly “in so secret manner that almost none but her mother was council.” May Day is a suitably romantic date—as Malory put it, “all ye that be lovers, call unto your remembrance the month of May, like as did Queen Guenivere.” May 1 is also Beltane, an important date in the witches’ calendar, and there would later be suggestions that witchcraft had been used to produce so unexpected a match between the king and a relatively obscure noblewoman.

  Although the marriage is cloaked in so many uncertainties, the ceremony was sufficiently covert that Richard III’s first Parliament, when the time came, would be able to denounce it as an “ungracious pretensed marriage” by which “the order of all politic rule was perverted,” a marriage that had taken place privately “and secretly, without Edition of Banns, in a private Chamber, a profane place.” The fact, however, was that the secrecy of this marriage did not make it illegal (there would be other reasons brought in to support that allegation); indeed, even the mere consent of the two parties before witnesses might have been enough to make the match a valid one. But the surreptitiousness did give the union an odd aura, at a time when the church was endeavoring to regulate marriage ceremonies—an aura all the odder, of course, in view of the very different style in which a king’s wedding would usually be celebrated.

  Elizabeth’s mother, Jacquetta, would be blamed for her part in making this marriage, but there were two mothers in this story, and however much Jacquetta might have wanted the match, Cecily was equally set against it. Whether Cecily heard before the event and failed to dissuade her son, or learned of the marriage afterward, she was furiously angry—“sore moved,” as More would put it, and “dissuaded that marriage as much as she possible might.” It is hard not to think of Elizabeth Woodville when one reads of Thomas Malory’s Merlin trying to dissuade King Arthur from marrying Guenivere: “As of her beauty and fairness she is one of the fairest alive. But an ye loved her not so well as ye do, I should find you a damosel of beauty and of goodness that should like you and please you, and your heart were not set. But there as man’s heart is set, he will be loath to return.” Edward’s heart was similarly set upon Elizabeth, as Cecily was about to find out: More’s account of her arguments against Elizabeth goes on for pages, showing her urging her son upon the vital importance of marrying for foreign alliance and objecting “that it was not princely to marry his own subject, no great occasion leading thereunto, no possessions, or other commodities, depending thereupon, but only as it were a rich man would marry his maid, only for a little wanton dotage upon her person.”

  Elizabeth Woodville’s person, of course, was very much the question—what she looked like and what about her could have been so seductive. The urge to know these things is to some degree the same with all of these women, of course, but information is scarce and sometimes confusing. Margaret Beaufort’s later associate John Fisher revealed that she was small and slight; Cecily, meanwhile, was apparently a beauty (and since her husband was slight and dark, her son tall and golden, we can guess she was a statuesque blonde). Elizabeth of York’s full bust was described by ambassadors, and her long yellow hair was admired at her coronation; Anne Neville was sufficiently similar to Elizabeth for them to be noted as wearing the same clothes. Margaret of Burgundy was described by the chronicler Jean de Haynin as notably tall “like her brother Edward” and having “an air of intelligence and wit.” Portraits of her show an oval face, straight nose, firm lips, and a receding chin—not a b
eauty, but someone you might be glad to know.

  The same ideal of female beauty probably held sway throughout the whole medieval era: gold hair, black eyebrows, white skin, high forehead, small but slightly swelling lips—eyes sparkling and usually gray—small high breasts, narrow waist, long arms, slim white fingers. (Perkin Warbeck—a pretender but nonetheless well equipped with princely graces—would write to the noble lady he was courting of her “eyes, as brilliant as stars . . . your white neck, easily outshining pearls . . . your peerless brow, the glowing bloom of youth, the bright gold hair.”) To quote one contemporary writer, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, “Let the upper arms, as long as they are slender, be enchanting. Let the fingers be soft and slim in substance, smooth and milk-white in appearance, long and straight in shape. . . . Let the snowy bosom present both breasts like virginal gems set side by side. Let the waist be slim, a mere handful. . . . [L]et the leg show itself graceful, let the remarkably dainty foot wanton with its own daintiness.” Osbern Bokenham in the mid-fifteenth century, writing a life of female saints for Isabella, the Countess of Essex and Richard of York’s sister, described Saint Margaret:

  her forehead lily white

  Her bent brows black and her grey eyen

  . . . her chin, which as plain

  Polished marble shone, & cloven in twain.

  Marguerite of Anjou was depicted in an illustration with honeyblonde hair, despite the Milanese description of her as dark—but queens usually were shown as blonde: fairness was attributed to the Virgin Mary. The trouble is that the depiction or description of queens might then owe more to the ideal than to reality.

  But unlike most of the other women here, Elizabeth Woodville can boast enough of a legacy of recognizable portraiture to suggest a beauty that shines down the centuries as well as conforming to that early ideal, beauty enough that the trying fashion for a high shaven forehead and hair drawn plainly back only illuminates its smooth regularity. A 1470s depiction shows her with red dress beneath blue cloak, like that of the Virgin Mary—red for earthly nature, blue for heavenly attributes, with roses (virginity) and gillyflowers (virtuous love, motherhood). Elizabeth would choose the deep-red gillyflower as her personal symbol; the name also meant “queen of delights.”

  So even her prospective mother-in-law, Cecily, had to admit that there might be “nothing to be misliked” in the person of “this widow.” But she (and many others among Edward’s advisers) found plenty else of which to complain. First, of course, there was the simple difference in rank and the fact that Elizabeth brought no great foreign alliance. Warwick—convinced that only a French marriage would put an end to French support for Marguerite of Anjou—had been in the process of negotiating for Bona, daughter of the Duke of Savoy, when Edward apparently broke the news of this other contract. The Italian visitor Mancini would later claim that Cecily declared Edward was illegitimate, his choice of a woman of lower rank proof he could not be of the blood of kings.

  It is debatable just how far from suitable Elizabeth actually was. Certainly, she was not the princess a king might usually have been expected to marry, but her mother, Jacquetta, did, after all, come from the cadet branch of the Luxembourg family that gave her connections with the emperors of Germany and the kings of Bohemia. Obviously, a woman’s status came from her father, and a mother could not give to her husband and children her superior rank. That said, women through the medieval period frequently chose—in the modes of expression open to them, most notably in the arms displayed on their seals—to reflect their maternal heritage, showing that this part of their lineage could still be significant. Indeed, much play would be made, when the time came for Elizabeth’s coronation, of her connections with European royalty. Then again, there may also have been some popularity value in Elizabeth’s very Englishness—Marguerite had arguably soured the market for French princesses—and even a reconciliatory gain from her family’s attachment to the Lancastrian cause.

  But Elizabeth’s widowhood was another problem. There was at the very least a strong sentiment (More and Mancini put it higher and make it a custom) that the king’s bride should be a virgin, not a widow, the more so if she was to provide the children who would inherit the throne. Decades later Isabella of Castile was still throwing up the fact that Edward had refused her for “a widow of England,” and the king’s brother Clarence, said Mancini, would go so far as to declare the marriage illegal because of this. More reports (or imagines) Cecily as declaring that “it is an unfitting thing, and a very blemish, and high disparagement, to the sacred majesty of a prince . . . to be defiled with bigamy in his first marriage,” and it may have been that Elizabeth’s previous marriage was enough to make this one seem bigamous. Later, another, more serious, issue would raise its head.

  The king’s heart, however, was set. Edward answered his mother, More says, that “he knew himself out of her rule.” Playing to Cecily’s well-known religiosity, he added that surely, “marriage being a spiritual thing,” it should follow the guidance of God who had inclined these two parties “to love together” rather than be made for temporal advantage. But perhaps attitudes were changing—or perhaps they had, indeed, never been that clear-cut. The writers of the courtly love tradition, and Malory in their wake, may not necessarily have envisaged love as located in the context of a marriage, but they certainly had no problem in crediting women with romantic feelings and sexual desires. And Edward III had allowed several of his children to make a love match, as his namesake may very well have now pointed out.

  As for Warwick and his French schemes, Edward added, surely his cousin could not be so unreasonable as “to look that I should in choice of wife rather be ruled by his eye than by my own, as though I were a ward that were bound to marry by the appointment of a guardian.” This was perhaps the crunch—that Edward was getting tired of his mother’s, and his mentor’s, governance. And anyway, the deed was done; in the face of mounting rumors, Edward admitted as much to his council in September 1464, albeit, said Waurin, in a “right merry” way that surely bespoke embarrassment. Elizabeth was presented to the court on September 30, Michaelmas Day, in the Chapel of Reading Abbey, led in by Edward’s brother Clarence and the Earl of Warwick, in a ceremony that may have been aimed at replacing the big public wedding that would usually have made a queen.

  The only Englishwoman to become queen consort since the Norman Conquest, Elizabeth Woodville was crowned the following spring, in a ceremony of great magnificence in the presence of her uncle Jacques of Luxembourg—careful reminder that although Elizabeth might not be a foreign princess, her mother, Jacquetta, could still boast of a European royal kin. Edward had been ordering from abroad “divers jewels of gold and precious stones, against the Coronation of our dear wife the Queen,” silk for her chairs and saddle, plate, gold utensils, and cloths of gold. Other expenses show a more homely touch: the bridge master of London Bridge was purchasing paints, glue, and colored paper, “party gold” and “party silver.” Elizabeth would be greeted by eight effigies in the pageant as she crossed the river, coming from Eltham to the south. Six of the effigies were of women—virgins—with kerchiefs on their heads over wigs made of flax and dyed with saffron; two were angels, their wings resplendent with nine hundred peacock feathers. Elizabeth made her way to the Tower, where tradition dictated she would spend the night, along streets especially sprinkled with sand, through air alive with song. The next day she was carried in a horse litter to Westminster, where she was to spend the night, her arrival heralded by the white and blue splendor of several dozen newly made knights.

  Details of the coronation survive in a contemporary manuscript. Elizabeth entered Westminster Hall under a canopy of cloth of gold, in a purple mantle, flanked by bishops and with scepters in her right hand and her left. Removing her shoes before she entered sacred ground, she walked barefoot, followed by her attendants, led by Cecily’s sister, Anne, the dowager Duchess of Buckingham; with Edward’s sisters, Elizabeth and Margaret; the queen’s own mother, Jacquetta;
and more than forty other ladies of rank.

  As the procession moved up to the high altar, the queen first knelt, and then prostrated herself, for the solemnities. She was anointed with the holy unction and escorted to her throne “with great reverence and solemnity.” This (for a queen as well as to a greater degree for a king) was a ceremony that not only acknowledged but actually created the sacred nature of monarchy.

  After mass was sung, the queen processed back into the palace, where Elizabeth retired into her chamber before the banquet begun. It was to be a meal of three “courses,” each of some fifteen or twenty dishes, followed by wafers, hippocras (a wine), and spices, served with the utmost ceremony. Before it the queen washed, while the Duke of Clarence held the basin. For the entire duration of the meal, the Duke of Suffolk (husband to the king’s sister Elizabeth) and the Earl of Essex knelt beside her, one on either side. To signal each course trumpets were sounded, and a procession of mounted knights made the rounds of the great Westminster Hall. Musicians played solemn music, and the festivities ended with a tournament the next day, the victor of which was Lord Stanley, now in good graces with the Yorkists after abandoning Marguerite at the battle of Blore Heath.

  The king had not been present at the ceremonies, and this was normal procedure: the queen was always the most important person present at her own coronation day. But there is another whose name does not appear in the records: the king’s mother, Cecily.

  It was at this time that Cecily elaborated her title of “My Lady the King’s Mother”—used by her, though more often accorded to Margaret Beaufort—into “Cecily, the king’s mother, and late wife unto Richard in right king of England and of France and lord of Ireland,” or, more directly, “Queen by Right.” Though she spent less time now at court, she still kept an apartment—the “queen’s chambers”—in one of the royal palaces. Rather than attempt to dispossess his mother, Edward built a new one for his wife.